From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Xah Lee Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: info reference syntax Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:56:51 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <20090109192209.GQ10452@stats.ox.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1231773066 29124 80.91.229.12 (12 Jan 2009 15:11:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:11:06 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Jan 12 16:12:17 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1LMOSV-0006YU-R9 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:12:08 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:46443 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1LMORF-00047Y-72 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:10:49 -0500 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!f20g2000yqg.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 95 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.6.175.142 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1231768611 20768 127.0.0.1 (12 Jan 2009 13:56:51 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:56:51 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: f20g2000yqg.googlegroups.com; posting-host=24.6.175.142; posting-account=bRPKjQoAAACxZsR8_VPXCX27T2YcsyMA User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1, gzip(gfe), gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:165931 X-Mailman-Approved-At: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:10:27 -0500 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:61263 Archived-At: On Jan 9, 1:12 pm, Dan Davison wrote: > On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 08:27:40PM +0100, Lennart Borgman wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Dan Davison wr= ote: > > > What does this syntax mean? > > > > ,---- > > > | See Info node `(viper)Top'. > > > `---- > > > > Is there some way of using it to immediately access the info node > > > referred to? > > > M-: (info "(viper) Top") > > Great, thanks. That is useful to know. > > "(viper) Top" still seems like a pretty weird syntax. Just out of > curiosity, is there some explanation? I see that the shell version is > 'info filename nodename'. And according to wikipedia info was written > for GNU/linux. So it's a post-linux emacs design? Wouldn't > > (info filename &optional nodename) > > have been more natural? it'd be much better if emacs adopted html as its standard doc format. It would than just be: http://gnu.org/doc/emacs/viper/top.html in this format, every programer understand what it is. In =E2=80=9C(info "(viper)Top")=E2=80=9D or =E2=80=9C(viper)Top=E2=80=9D, maybe 0.001% of pro= gramers knew what it is. If we count among emacs users who used emacs for no more than 2 years, the percentage is perhaps 10%. Personally, i use emacs daily, staying in emacs most of the time when using computer, since 1998, and have been using text terminal based emacs exclusively from 1998 to 2005. I didn't know what is =E2=80=9C(info "...")=E2=80=9D until 2005 or so thru chatting in freenode's emacs irc. Adopting html as standard doc format is easy to do, in fact mostly just a political gesture. Texinfo can already convert to html, and most if not all GNU's doc are already presented in html format on GNU's site. with adoption of html, people will naturally citing doc by url instead of =E2=80=9Cinfo xyz=E2=80=9D. This will help understanding and consequentl= y spread emacs. For example, if in a discussion in some programing forum, someone might mention =E2=80=9Clook (info xyz) in emacs=E2=80=9D. Vast majo= rity of readers wouldn't understand what that is will simply ignore it. But if html doc is official, then the citing would be =E2=80=9Chttp://gnu.org/doc/ xyz.html=E2=80=9D, and those who saw this are very likely to click it. this wouldn't effect emacs much since emacs can and should still use info doc in emacs as a integrated system. But down the road, say in 5 years, emacs will need to deprecate texinfo eventually. The HTML/XHTML/ CSS/JavaScript world is literally with few million more users and developers. Their tools, technical power, extensibility, adoption... in every area, are few order of magnitude better than textinfo. In fact, i wouldn't be surprised that modern browser such as Firefox actually load html doc faster than a comparative info file. By adopting html now, it can pave the way for emacs transition to using html/xhtml as integrated doc component. For example, currently there's w3m for reading html. However, it's some 5 times slower than Firefox, and some 5 times slower than info reading texinfo. However, this can be improved. One could have html/xml parser buildin elisp as c code (or borrowing the rendering engine from firefox), so that reading html docs in emacs is acceptably fast as current reading in info. the integrated nature of info in emacs is really joy to use, especially programing in elisp. You can lookup any function or keyword in the lang so easily. However, if the lang is not elisp but perl, python, php, etc, then it's not so easy because you often have to download and install a info version of their doc (if it exist at all), and depending whether the guy who implemented your lang's mode took the fancy to implement info doc lookup features. (10 years ago, some mode would still support info doc. Today, as far as i know, nobody bothered with info version of docs.) When emacs accepted more html docs, it would mean the integrated doc feature automatically apply to all langs, such as java, perl, python, ruby, php, javascript... since their official doc are all html. Xah =E2=88=91 http://xahlee.org/ =E2=98=84